Individuals spend a considerable amount of time listening to radio and TV in their automobiles, homes, and boats, as well as elsewhere with portable devices. Frequently the listener will hear or see a new tune, act, recitation, story, etc., which has sufficient appeal to the listener to cause the listener to think "I wish I had that on tape!" By then of course, the broadcast has moved on to other material or segment, and the content of interest is "lost forever". If the material or segment is a commercially available recording, such as a tune by some recognized artist, then of course the listener can purchase a copy at a later time. But in this case the listener must buy an entire album to obtain a copy of the one piece of interest. It is also an inconvenience to remember the particulars if a new artist is involved, as it is to have to make a shopping trip. If the broadcast is a live program, it can be very difficult to recover a copy later, and in many cases impossible.
One could accomplish the functions of this invention by using two commercially available tape recorders (or one with dual heads), one with a "continuous loop" tape which would serve as the monitor and short term storage media, and one with a regular blank recording tape to serve as long term storage. One could also simply record entire radio or TV programs, and select out desired sections for re-recording later. Neither of these techniques is very convenient, however, as both involve a cumbersome amount of equipment and time. While they are acceptable for home use, perhaps, (in fact the second alternative is regularly used in the home) the inconvenient arrangement generally prohibits their effective use in automobiles and portable situations. Even in the home the time involved in set-up, monitoring, and recopy limits the practice to special situations. A recovery recorder which was simply always monitoring any program observed would facilitate much more convenient and frequent use. No current model automobile audio cassette players are designed to record at all, and no current model portable audio cassette players (including those with dual cassette carriers) or home video recorders are designed to facilitate convenient (hands-off) continuous monitoring with short term storage and automatic transfer to long term storage.